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Nearly popping out of a mural with his fiery red shirt and stern stare, Juan Jose Dominguez surveys a 1784 land grant while eyeing a roomful of South Bay artifacts. By his expression, it's as if the Spanish soldier knows about the fight between two institutions for the space in which he stands.
The dispute between the Rancho de Los Palos Verdes Historical Society Museum in Palos Verdes Estates and the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District escalated this week from a verbal tussle to a courtroom battle.
The school district told the museum in mid-June that it had until Saturday to vacate its 3,800-square-foot facility and make way for the school district, which wants the space for its special education programs.
The museum, which sits on school property and houses a large display of Peninsula history, has refused, prompting the school district to file a lawsuit Monday seeking to force it out.
If the school district gets its way, Dominguez and the rest of the mural would be protected by a plexiglass shield--or be destroyed- -and the items surrounding the painting would change from plows and swords to dry-erase boards and desks.
The rest of the museum's 2,500 artifacts, including fossils of a baleen whale's head, a mammoth's tusk and a floor-to-ceiling mural of a Gabrielino Indian village, would have to move.
"I'm just dumbfounded," Sylvia B. Thompson of...